Pulitzer Prize-winner Wright’s Going Clear promises to be reveal tons of super creepy details about the Church of Scientology, was a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and has been turned into a documentary by HBO.

Adam nominated this title for Football Book Club because: “When this book came out, everyone I knew was reading it and was absolutely shocked by it. I never got a around to reading it, but am now prepared to be shocked.”

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It has recently come to my attention that the once charming eccentricities of my more distant family members have devolved into full blown pathologies. The wild uncle once known for his cutting wit and free spirit has grown shiftless, unreliable, and selfish. The morbid aunt has become clinically depressed and briefly suicidal. The uptight cousin stifled and cold. The passive in-law oppressed. The bossy uncle controlling, shortsighted, and unkind.

This malignant mutation of character is, of course, not an uncommon phenomenon — and one certainly familiar to anyone who has watched a large family grow old. However, as I slogged through Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, it was this transformation — and those elderly aunts and uncles and second cousins — to which my thoughts returned again and again.

Anderson’s interconnected tales of the sad residents of Winesburg is prefaced by a short chapter titled “The Book of the Grotesque,” in which the narrator describes an old writer’s unpublished work: A catalogue of stories about people he has known, all of whom have “become grotesques.”

Ryan, when I read your post I wondered: were you able to avoid watching football? I have to say I found it damned difficult to avoid it entirely. This week I started to feel like watching football was immoral, was like watching a beheading — and I felt ashamed when I’d sneak peaks. Though sneak peaks I did, as when the TV in the Amtrak waiting area was turned to ESPN and I saw the highlights from the Sunday games. That’s when I learned of the Packers-Bears outcome (sorry Adam). I was also at a bar, waiting for friends, when I spied a sad bit of gridiron action between the Falcons and the Eagles (a bird game!). An Eagles cornerback made an amazing one-handed interception to save a touchdown, and I thought, “Wow, that kind of athleticism is astounding.” But then a few plays later a bunch of Falcons defenders piled on an Eagles running back, and I wondered what sub-concussive damage the scrum was inflicting on itself — and all for an extra yard or two.

I thought I found my hook for Winesburg, Ohio early on, in the “Mother”chapter, soon after we spent the previous pages with Whig Biddlebaum, formerly the Pennsylvania school teacher Adolph Myers, falsely accused of being improper with his students, now in hiding in the town of his aunt. The trauma of his former life has manifested itself in his hands — his hands were what the townsfolk in Pennsylvania kept referencing as they beat him — and he keeps them hidden at all times, except where his story peaks, while giving an inspirational speech to George Willard in which he touches the youth’s head and then shoulders and then runs to his house, still in mid-sentence. The next chapter shifts to the perspective of George Willard’s mother, who sees “a secret something in him which is striving to grow,” and is considering killing her husband after she hears him telling her son it’s time to wake up and make something of himself.

I have a soft-spot for this clockwork narrative structure, especially when used to approach the nature of a group of people, partly because one of my earliest reading memories is of a series about a high school football team, which, on a book-by-book basis, functioned the same way. (Which I could’ve sworn was called Blitz. But that doesn’t exist on the Internet; no YA series from the ’80s about a high school football team does.) Each book focused on a different member of the team — the running back, the wide receiver, a defensive lineman — and just like here, the characters you’ve met in previous POVs drift into others as ancillary characters. Reading this so young, it formed my romantic expectations of the high school experience, similar to the way other ’80s babies from back home talk with longing about Saved by the Bell. I was eager to spend this week’s entry probing this strain of sentimentality inside me — I’ve almost come to blows defending the clockwork structure of the middle section of The Savage Detectives — it was the perfect way to tie this week’s book to football in a way that was germane to both.

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I took a course called “The Writer as Teacher” while enrolled in Columbia University’s writing program. (Though at the time, I missed its underlying message: Thanks for the $50,000 tuition, here’s your job prospect.)

I thought about that class as I read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio — a book that seems ubiquitous in high school or college classrooms. I apparently missed the syllabi that assigned it, so kudos to an anti-NFL book club for picking up the slack.

Read today, Winesburg, Ohio feels like a primordial short story collection. Maybe it’s unfair to hold a book published in 1919 against modern standards, but then again I have no problem holding the San Francisco 49ers to the standards they established in the 1980s.

Each story has a very basic structure. A noisy narrator — often and suddenly addressing the audience directly — contextualizes an upcoming situation and the character involved. That character then goes on “an adventure” — Anderson’s shorthand for “shit goes down.”

This week, Football Book Club will be reading Brain Fever by Kimiko Hahn and talking about Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio — our selection from last week. So be sure to crack open your copy of Brain Fever and check in with FBC for all our thoughts on Winesburg, Ohio and life without the NFL.

Brain Fever is the 10th book of poetry from Hahn, who won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and an American Book Award in 2008 and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010. For more information on Hahn, check out these pieces from BOMB and the Kenyon Review.

Rob nominated this title for Football Book Club because: “Kimiko Hahn is a dear friend, and I’m a fan of her previous book Toxic Flora — The New York Times did a great article about her use of their Science Times section for the book. I’m eager to see where she goes in her newest collection, and I hope the way she weaves science into lyric takes on age-old subjects makes her appealing to a FBC.”

Through the book club, I aim to challenge the myths and realities my busyness may have afforded me all these years.

When I was invited to participate in this book club, I wasn’t convinced I’d have much to contribute. I didn’t exactly grow up watching sports. I grew up watching the people I loved watch sports. At my grandparents’ house, for instance, I floated in and out of the family room while my father, Uncle Mike, and grandfather leaned over the edges of their chairs and talked back to the television, or waved their hands at one another in disagreement about a play. They were having their time together.

Years later, my time came, too. I got married and started raising two children in Pittsburgh. Gradually, I learned the Steelers’ roster, the names of the defensive coordinators, and what to expect from local commentators. I got geeked about Bill Cowher’s post-game interviews and, later, Mike Tomlin’s. Like Evan, the doctor Steve Almond interviewed in the “Their Sons Grow Suicidally Beautiful” chapter, I got hooked on football through a kind of collective identity. With each game, I felt like less of a stranger in Pittsburgh. I had a team! My family and I wore NFL jerseys for the first time. Even our dog had a jersey. Watching the Steelers was the one family ritual everyone agreed on — especially as the kids grew older and drifted toward their teen years. We were having our time together.

And now I was being asked to stop watching? I wasn’t ready to let go. I wanted to keep my NFL fantasy going. Before the book club, though, would I have even acknowledged upholding a fantasy?Read More

Football is a symptom, not a cause: Of the way we’re implicated in all the worst aspects of our country and culture.

Adam, Dan, and Ryan — reading your posts makes me realize, first and foremost, that I am not much of a Packers fan. Or rather, I don’t have much of a problem watching the team I grew up worshipping…unless they start to win. The losses are easy, but when the wins start adding up everything changes. Like last fall, for instance, after the first few games (and after our QB’s sage advice) — and quite possibly this fall too. Then all the old feelings start to kick in: hope, excitement, a seductive sense of urgency.

But that’s not what I want to talk about, after reading Against Football. I felt like nobody could read such a book and avoid deciding one way or another whom they wanted to be in relation to the sport. It reminded me of this scene from The Sopranos. We too cannot say we haven’t been told.

Were I making a list of things I’d have absolutely no problem missing out on — a head wound, the music of Slipknot, gonorrhea, a close personal friendship with Anthony Weiner — Bears’ pre-season football would land pretty close to the top.

Let’s be honest: Pre-season football is all but meaningless, features a sad array of fringe players, and provides an unreliable barometer of a team’s prospects once the games actually count for something. I know this to be true because in the last four weeks Chicago lost just one game and Jay Cutler — when he wasn’t moodily smoking cigarettes behind Halas Hall — didn’t commit a single turnover. I challenge anyone to make a case that those numbers are remotely indicative of what’s going to happen next week against Green Bay.

The book actually sat on my shelf for months before I could bring myself to read it. Every so often I’d walk past it, pick it up, return it to the shelf, and give it a sad look — because I pretty much knew reading Against Football was going to kill my relationship with the NFL.

Adam nominated this title for Football Book Club because: “At some point I was revising some short stories and my professor said me, ‘Have you read Winesburg, Ohio? You really have to read Winesburg, Ohio.’ Since then, I have forgotten which stories I was revising, which professor suggested the book, and why he or she thought it was so vital I read it. I did, however, purchase a copy of the book. So, it’s probably about time — plus, my wife raves about the story ‘Hands.'”